Pico Cassettes are Cartridges for Your Phone for Abstract Reasons

A new Japanese startup called Beatrobo wants to bring the idea of owning games on lumps of plastic back into fashion via its Pico Cassette concept -- a cartridge for your smartphone that enables easy swapping of titles and personalised cloud game saves.

Beatrobo says that what's missing from today's games is a sense of ownership, with the transient nature of the digital download not giving us the same deep-seated feeling of joy as buying and owning a game embedded into a physical object.

Which is quite a good point. The problem for Beatrobo is that its Pico Cassettes don't contain the game either, being little more than keys that plug into a phone's headphone socket to unlock a previously downloaded digital app. They're lumps of nothing that add needless bulk to your over-designed £600 fashion statement.

However, all weirdness of the concept is overlooked and forgiven because of this bizarre advert for the concept that it's stuck on YouTube. I'll have 24 Flappy Bird clones for my Xiaomi, please. [Pico Cassette via The Verge]